Education Chief Proposes Faster End To Bad Schools

Illinois' top education official is proposing to make it easier for the state to shut down poorly achieving schools that do not shape up.

There is a stiff education accountability law on the books, but it lays out such an elaborate process that it would take 10 years before a school could pay the ultimate price for academic failure.

State schools Supt. Joseph Spagnolo wants to cut that period to eight years.

In 1991, in response to demands from politicians and other citizens that the public schools be made more accountable, state lawmakers enacted a law requiring the Illinois State Board of Education to establish an academic watch list. If a school stays on the watch list long enough, the law says, it can be shut down.

A school is placed on the list if at least 50 percent of its student scores on state-required tests in reading, writing, mathematics, science and social studies do not meet state goals, and if state education officials determine a school does not have an acceptable improvement plan and does not comply with state education laws and regulations.

Schools on the academic watch list are to receive help from state education officials on how to improve. If they still are deficient after two years, they get another two years to shape up. And if, after a total of four years on the list, they still have declining test scores, they can be closed.

But after state officials spent two years developing specific criteria and two more years visiting 1,500 schools, Spagnolo said that not one--even among those that had more than half their students failing on the tests--failed in all the ways set out in the law.

Teachers and administrators in schools statewide were outraged that they had spent countless hours preparing for the state visits. Yet though the law requires an academic watch list, there were no schools to put on it.

Spagnolo, seeking to streamline the process, announced an interim accountability measure Thursday. Next month, he will issue an "academic warning list" of schools where at least 50 percent of student scores on the five tests did not meet state goals for learning for the last two years.

Spagnolo hopes lawmakers will change the accountability law so that the watch list is based only on test scores, and the state can skip the visits. He also wants the state to be able to shut a school down after two years on the watch list, not four.

The academic warning list would become the academic watch list in 1999, and schools still would have four years to improve, from 1997 to 2001. Without the change, 2003 would be the first year a lagging school could be shut down.

But even with the change, the law will have failed to help an entire generation of elementary school pupils. In a grade school with abysmal test scores, a child who entered kindergarten in 1991, the year lawmakers adopted the accountability law, will have gone on to high school by 2001.

Spagnolo has $9 million in his budget to help schools on the academic warning list.

But the idea of streamlining the process met some skepticism.

"What if 20 percent of schools do not meet expectations?" asked Michael Skarr, state school board president. That would be 800 of the 4,000 Illinois public schools.

"I am concerned that we will overpromise and underdeliver," Skarr said, adding he's concerned if the state will have enough educators to help the ailing schools. "That is the worst thing we could do."